Youth, Day, Old Age and Night

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · A Song of the Rolling Earth · 1856

Youth, large, lusty, loving⁠—youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?

Day full-blown and splendid⁠—day of the immense sun, action, ambition, laughter,
The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and restoring darkness.

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1856). The 1855 scan also matches these four lines, inside a longer poem; this piece first matches as a whole in 1856. Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the Whitman Archive transcription of the 1856 Fowler & Wells edition (ppp.00237). The corpus text follows the 1891–92 arrangement, by which the poem had been revised. First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass, a-song-of-the-rolling-earth.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L4.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Youth, Day, Old Age and Night.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1856). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/youth-day-old-age-and-night/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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